It’s Time for You to Take the Cloud Back From Corporations

Ben Wiseman

It was a typical day in the cloud. I was at my desk, streaming music onto my phone, collaborating with colleagues on synced files hosted online; I then killed a little time by horsing around on a discussion board with some friends.

The difference was, this cloud wasn’t part of Google or Dropbox. It was … mine, hosted out of an old computer parked under my kitchen table. It streams, syncs files across computers, and does basic social networking. I can access it online from any computer or my mobile phone.

But it’s a “personal cloud”: I own and run the hardware. The simple act of building and running it has given me a glimpse of a possible alternate future for the Internet. It’s an increasingly popular one too.

That’s the Edward Snowden effect: People now know that the cloud isn’t intangible. It’s hardware run by large companies, snoopable by spy agencies.

The software I used, Tonido, has been around a few years, but its user base doubled to more than 1 million people in 2012—mostly in the second half of the year. Last summer BitTorrent released personal-cloud software called Sync, and by December it had already amassed 2 million users. That’s partly the Edward Snowden effect: People now know that the cloud isn’t intangible. It’s hardware run by large companies, snoopable by spy agencies. “2013 was the year that everyone became aware of what a server was,” BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker says. “With Sync, if anybody wants to know what you’re doing, they can’t go and ask one of the big servers. They have to hand the warrant to you.”

But as I discovered, running a cloud brings with it deeper and weirder pleasures. When you’re master of your own domain, you subtly change your relationship to being online. In a thread with friends on my Tonido service, I discovered that I was far more willing to be jokey or nuts or to curse like a sailor. I was no longer worried about my postings suddenly becoming public without my knowledge, as when Facebook “revises” its privacy settings in the middle of the night.

Another outcome: You realize that, holy Moses, putting stuff online is not rocket science anymore. The “convenience” argument—we give up privacy to big cloud firms because they make things easy—begins to erode. Running a home server used to require nerd judo, but with Tonido it took me about 15 minutes to set up and a few minutes more to invite friends in. It’ll work on whatever decrepit laptop you’ve got lying around.

The ‘convenience’ argument — we give up privacy to big cloud firms because they make things easy — begins to erode.

In fact, these tools can perform even better than corporate stuff: Since BitTorrent Sync has no data limits, users move 40 times more data over it than people sync on Dropbox.

Granted, personal clouds create new problems. A blizzard knocked out my DSL for a day, taking my cloud with it. A house fire destroys not just your laptop but your cloud backup as well. I don’t have a Google-size phalanx of programmers to keep hackers at bay. Tonido’s social software is functional but super-ugly, and, frankly, part of the point of huge public social networks like Facebook is that they are huge. And public.

So personal clouds will be used selectively—by people bringing the truly private parts of their lives (sensitive documents, personal discussions) back under their control. Imagine today’s teenagers realizing they can run a free, invitation-only social network on their computer or smartphone. The mind reels.